Taoist schools that speak of immortality generally situate inner cultivation within a rich ritual and ceremonial framework. Entry into a lineage often involves formal initiation, including bowing to a teacher, receiving a Dharma name, and taking on precepts that shape conduct and secrecy. Such initiation and transmission ceremonies establish a living connection to a line of practice and are understood to anchor the more subtle work of transforming essence, energy, and spirit. Lineage ties, altar rituals, and invocations to deities and immortals together create a sacred context in which the practitioner’s efforts are held and guided.

Purification is treated as a prerequisite for deeper work. Rites of fasting, abstention from meat, alcohol, and sexual activity, ritual bathing, and confession practices are used to clear physical and emotional burdens before more intensive cultivation. These may be accompanied by specific dietary disciplines, including periods of grain abstention, and by the use of talismans or registers that ritually align the practitioner with protective and overseeing spiritual forces. Such measures are not merely moral or hygienic; they are seen as preparing the subtle body so that the inner alchemical processes can unfold more stably.

Daily and seasonal ceremonies further weave individual practice into larger cosmic rhythms. Practitioners may offer incense, recite scriptures, and bow before images of deities, immortals, and lineage ancestors at dawn and dusk, or at specially chosen hours of the night and early morning. Participation in rites connected to solstices, equinoxes, lunar phases, and festivals for particular deities or star powers is understood to harmonize personal cultivation with the cycles of heaven and earth. In this way, the search for longevity and spiritual refinement is not isolated from the world but consciously synchronized with it.

Within this ritual frame, the core work of internal and external alchemy is also treated ceremonially. Internal alchemy sessions often follow set times, directions, and postures, sometimes accompanied by silent invocations of inner deities and the recitation of mantras or sacred texts regarded as “texts of immortality.” External alchemy, where it is still maintained, may involve carefully structured rites for preparing and consuming elixirs, supported by fasting and purification. Group practices such as collective chanting, meditation, and energy circulation can function as community ceremonies that reinforce individual efforts, focusing intention and consolidating the transformation of essence, energy, and spirit that these schools hold at the heart of the immortal path.